The Innocent Moon

by Henry Williamson

  As the night drew down, a moon rose over the downs like a barn-owl’s face peering from the rafters of heaven, the stars like chinks in the roof.

  “Mother,” said Phillip, one evening, “What do you really think of me? My character, I mean. Tell me, truthfully! You won’t hurt my feelings. A good writer has to learn two things. First, may I read to you what I have just written? Here goes.

  “‘The first thing a writer has to do is to discard all commonplace attitudes of thought about people. He must be able to see the truth, which means he must shed all prejudices formed in childhood, boyhood, and early manhood. Even if it means turning against, at least outwardly, his own people and surroundings. That is what Jesus did.

  “‘The second thing is to learn how to put down words to convey the simplicity of truth. But it is essential’”—as he sipped the cocoa his mother had brought to the garden room—“‘to know himself. This involves, or rather devolves, a recognition in himself of those traits which he specially dislikes in those about him. The old glass house, in other words, and no stones thrown’. Tell me, Mum quite honestly, where d’you think I deviate from that apologia?”

  “I think perhaps you are at times a little intolerant, dear.”

  “You mean about things I don’t like? But I try to keep that to myself.”

  “I know you do, but others feel it all the same, you know. Perhaps you are too wrapped up in yourself, and so give the impression of not being interested in other people’s lives.”

  “Did you get that impression from reading this journal—in regard to Spica, I mean? Please say exactly what you think. I am not Father, remember, who scorns all opinions except his own.”

  “That isn’t fair to your Father, Phillip. He has had a lot to contend with.”

  “Including me, I suppose?”

  “Well dear, he naturally feels anxious about his son. He is getting on in life, you know, and a parent wants to feel happy about his or her children. Small or grown-up, our children are still our children, you know.”

  “I understand, Hetty. Now tell me your true opinion about what is wrong between Spica and me.”

  “I think that she is worried because you sometimes appear to be wasting, instead of conserving, your energy, by girding against things you cannot help. You do, you know.”

  “But things are so terrible! People lack vision! Look at this report on my novel from Dipp, Sons, and Peddle, to whom Anders Norse sent it. My book tells the truth about the war, which the publishers say people are no longer interested in. But people know nothing about the real war! They were pap-fed on romantic or idealistic lies while it was going on! However, this is what Anders told me, ‘The Managing Director of Dipp, Sons, and Piddle—beg pardon, Peddle—wrote, “I agree with you that one day Mr. Phillip Maddison will write a very great book.” However, he returned the Manuscript, partly because it is about the war, for which there is no public today. He told Anders he would like to see another novel of Mr. Maddison’s …’ etc. etc. etc. But Mr. Piddling Dipp damn well won’t! Now don’t laugh, Hetty. Be serious, please.”

  Hetty went on laughing. What a mixture he was—far too serious one moment, and ribald the next. He was her brother Hugh all over again.

  “Just a minute, Hetty! I finished another country story six weeks ago, and Anders has read it. He says, ‘It is a novel of the first rank’. He adds that he is leaving Whelpton Redd in Henrietta Street—that’s the literary agency for whom he works —and setting up on his own, and would I like him to act for me. He says that, if so he will send my new novel to Hassels, and expects Septimus Petal, the head of the firm, to take it.”

  Hetty began to laugh again. “Please be serious, Mum! Septimus Petal is the correct name. He’s a cousin of Quintus Pistil, the father of Octavius Pollen. But please be serious! The point is that Septimus Petal will turn down my novel. I’ll tell you how I know. Anders Norse is too enthusiastic. He showed me a chapter of the novel he’s writing, and asked for my opinion. There was a man and a girl on a cliff in Cornwall, and when a stoat runs past them to seize a rabbit by the throat —note that point—the sight rouses the man’s primitive nature, which affects the girl, so they, well—anyway, Norse said it brought out the pagan in both of them. I told him the sight of a stoat—which anyway doesn’t seize a rabbit by the throat, but bites into the jugular vein on the neck, being a hot-blood-drinker—I told Anders that the sight would arouse horror in the girl, and rage in the man, who would try and save the rabbit. He replied that he was trying to convey how primitive feelings of lust in the animal world affect human beings. Before this, he said to me, ‘I’m a great novelist, too, you know!’. Well, if that’s his criterion, then I don’t feel sure of him in judging my stuff. So, I think, Hassals will turn down my book, although it has no war in it!”

  “I see your point, dear, but perhaps your agent is only trying to be encouraging.”

  “I don’t want to be ‘encouraged’! Not like that, anyway! As I told you, one should never try to please people directly, it’s a kind of pandering to them. One should try and see people as the effects of causes—that is true sympathy.”

  “Drink your cocoa while it’s still hot, dear. You must build up your strength, you know.”

  “Oh, I’m all right. Well, thanks for coming in. I must get on with my work now. Take Zippy with you, will you? He comes in here through that broken window. He or it brought in a wretched hen sparrow the other morning. I must stick some brown paper over the hole. I think I’ll ask Norse for the book back, and send it to Spica.”

  A week later he called on his agent, who had moved to a basement room in the Adelphi. Anders Norse had decorated it himself; the rent, he told Phillip, was five shillings a week. He also told him that Hassells had turned his novel down, saying that it “fell between two stools”.

  Meanwhile Hetty had sold the house left to her by her father, and by February of the new year, completion-of-sale day, Phillip would have to give up the garden room.

  Christmas Day, 1920

  A lovely day, serene high blue sky and silver sun. Thrushes singing. Walked into Kent, this side of Biggin Hill. The wind was from the south, warm and gentle, and it seemed like Spring again. My spirit soared with a burning happiness. So vivid was my joy that distinctly I heard the corn sighing in the wind, and the hum of insects at high summer. The wheat in reality was 1½ ins. out of the earth, and so fragile and gentle. Air near Downe, where Darwin lived, was warmly crystalline, with far sounds clear. Cocks crowing, cows lowing (big farm in valley) tomtits calling, the drumming flutter of goldfinches’ wings passing over, robins’ trickles of song down below; sunlight gleaming on the stubble through the hedge, and making translucent the ryegrass and clover growing among the bleached stalks—the hay of next summer. One side of the hedge in white light, the other in darkness. The stubble and clover and thin grass blades lay at all angles, throwing slight silver gleams as I walked down the lee side of the hedge. The warm weather had brought innumerable gnats to life, to dance their feeble maze in the sunshine.

  I went on to the deserted chalk quarry on the Westerham road, and getting through the open window of the lime-burner’s cottage, now empty, made a fire of sticks in the grate.

  It was better than many a billet in the war, for the roof was intact. If the worst comes, I can easily live there, on bread, cheese, butter, and apples. And to sleep in my valise would be no hardship at all.

  I sat happily by my fire, reading Spica’s letter again and again. She says,

  ‘I have read the MSS twice, and in parts several times. You have treated it very well, keeping up the simplicity and the interest. I like the school part the least.’

  (Note. I was never happy about the school part. I feared it might spoil the first part. But it is done now.)

  ‘I love you hero and heroine; some of the descriptions are very vivid. The chapter where they are in the wood, lying beside the fire, and the nightingale is singing, has all the force and flicker of fire: it is very beautiful. I
like the way you have a few characters and bring them in again and again—the minor characters—it is a valuable addition to the simplicity of the story. The hero’s disappearance, and the cause, is a most artistic stroke; it has the suddenness of a blow, but not the heaviness of tragedy that would be too much for the book. It is the clearness, the simplicity, that is attractive; the humour and descriptions have the limpidness of running water.’

  Note. The hero is meant to be me, a man who cannot fit into normal life. The girl’s creation was influenced much by Spica herself, or my conception of her. Spica has said that she does not love me; but I have made my heroine love the hero. I am also all the other characters, including the small boy and the girl who feels that the boy is somehow part of herself, her secret inner life. Now that I have written even this little book (how my heart jumps and bubbles!) I can die happy. At the beginning of this journal I have stated that it is to be given to Tabitha Trevelian if I die. She may use any notes she likes for herself; she may have it published if it has any value. I should also like Anders Norse, my agent and friend, to read it.

  Dec. 27. Today a letter from Willie, who is now back at Ypres, or what’s left of it. I copy parts of it into my journal:

  ‘The next time that Christ comes on earth; otherwise, when the spirit that inspired the man called Jesus of Nazareth to the exclusion of all instincts and desires inspires another man wholly: he will suffer until he sees death as a release from frustration into the heaven of his own spirit. Orthodox Christians will reject him, saying, ‘There is only one Christ, and He is in Heaven with God the Father’: your ‘vision’ comes solely from the hysteria of ill-health.

  ‘I was standing at Tyne Cot cemetery, just below the village of Passchendaele, talking to some German ex-soldiers, when the idea came to me suddenly that the next Christ will appear very shortly: that I shall be the one to bear the message. At any rate, I shall try and give my convictions to the world. I am sure that Jesus has been misrepresented, and that many people now profess atheism because of the fables of His birth and physical resurrection—‘Impossible’, they exclaim. But these fables are the poetical visions of the people who wrote the New Testament, a century and more after Jesus was crucified—the spirit rather than the letter of fact, as you once wrote to me about your Donkin books. One thing occurs to me, in this patina of bright visions. The walking on water—might not this have been the equivalent of our English ‘treading on air’, expressing great spiritual accord and happiness among the disciples when the celestial power was on their Leader’s face, making it to shine with supernatural joy, so that they all felt that nothing could stop the Truth preached by their beloved prophet in the Beatitudes?

  ‘Richard Jefferies had touched the circle of Christ’s ideas when he died. It is apparent in his Story. Did he know it? I don’t think so. For Jefferies thought he died an atheist; even one of his present-day disciples, Henry S. Salt, protests vigorously that Jefferies was not a Christian. Mr. Salt does not see that it is the idea that counts. I hope to prove this. What an ideal! What a hope to hand on to millions of people! If only I could be at the head of the world, I think I would try and make a universal brotherhood. If the human race, which is one species, could act together, what might not be achieved: what happiness for all upon this beautiful planet!’

  Strange perhaps, but Willie’s letter makes me fear for him. I have recently been reading The Idiot, by Dostoieffski. How far is a tendency to fits involved with intense religious aspiration?

  Anyway, we both have our complexes, as Mrs. Portal-Welch would say. Willie to save the world: I to re-create the essence of the world of 1914–18.

  And yet—is not the world but a man’s own personal thoughts or impressions?

  I will now try to describe my idea of artistic genius. It is the power to give form to sublime emotion. What sublime emotion is one cannot say, except that it is bound up with the subconsciousness, as Freudians infer. Perhaps I should say rather the supra-consciousness, from the enlarged and numerous senses of the poet, in William Blake’s words. I am not a genius, although I thought once that I might be. I think that Willie has a streak of genius: his account of the German Concentration Graveyard has a unity and power that floats off the earth into the air. At the same time it is entirely human. If only he would write a book in those terms, instead of trying to save the world in one go, as it were! (Crude, but it conveys my meaning.)

  Most bodies are not sturdy enough to house genius—whence hysteria, madness from venereal disease, and, in sudden abandonment, suicide; and what is worse, dissipation and reversion of all virtue—to live without honour, in one’s own judgment, is the worst thing that can happen to a born artist.

  One thing I do know: that to reduce all aspects of art-creation, as do Crowe & Co. at the Parnassus Club, to subliminal sexual impulse, is merely the philosophy of their own barrenness. Of course the flower comes from the root; but also from the air; and to deny root or air is to be dead, actually and metaphorically speaking.

  To come down to mundane things; Mother says that Father is quite willing to let me go back into the house next door (odd: once this was the house next door) but he says I must be indoors by 11 p.m. and would I remember that. I thanked him, but said that I was thinking of taking a room somewhere in the country, near Reynard’s Common: a statement which I made up as I haven’t the slightest idea where I shall go after the Old Year is rung out.

  Elated by Spica’s letter about his story—composed from scenes imagined against a dream country arising from boyhood memories of Beau Brickhill and Reynard’s Common and beyond—Phillip wrote cheerfully to her, and received a reply that she was shortly passing through London with her mother, and if he had nothing better to do, would he meet them for tea at the buffet at Victoria station?

  There he met the two ladies; and asked by Mrs. Trevelian where he was living, he replied, “Oh, in Wakenham, Mrs. Trevelian.”

  “That dreadful place! It’s on the wrong side of the river, surely?”

  “Oh, no, Mother!” said Spica at once.

  Asked further how he was getting on, Phillip replied that he was now contributing to several papers—which was true enough, as he had had short guinea articles taken by five different London journals.

  Mother and daughter were on their way to Cambridge; he took them in a taxi across London to Liverpool Street station, keeping up to the end a manner, as suggested by his mother, of quiet, impersonal restraint; and saying goodbye before the train left, went to a waiting-room, feeling suddenly exhausted. Then remembering Jack O’Donovan, who lived in Wandsworth, he walked across the river and was told that he would be welcome to stay the night.

  Two music-halls were visited that Monday evening, for Jack to report in The Age. Phillip drank beer that he did not want. Jack’s everlasting talk about girls added to his fatigue, and he spent a sleepless night, finally lighting the gas and writing scenes for another book. He was told in the morning that he was welcome to stay as long as he liked, but left after breakfast. That night he wandered on the Embankment, at times trying to sleep while leaning against the granite parapet; one among hundreds of human derelicts and out-of-works, many of them ex-soldiers, who had come to pass the night on the iron seats, only to be moved along by policemen. The following night he spent on a leather bed in Rowton House, which cost a shilling; but the smells, groans, snores and mutterings of the tramps in the doss-house were enough: that semi-romantic experiment was not repeated.

  Jan. 18. I am quite happy in my old room at home, overlooking the garden.

  There must be another character in my climactic novel: an elderly man, egotistical, a scientist who can explain everything appertaining to the soul in terms of repressed desires, thwarted instincts, hereditary traits, and the foul pit of the subconscious. He can explain everything except how poetry is written, and how the flower breaks from the bud on the stem.

  Spica wrote to me c/o The Parnassus Club, saying that she had ‘been to London recently, once for pleasure a
nd twice for interviews with the Ministry of Labour’.

  She did not, of course, see me or tell me that she was coming up. Yet she must write and mention afterwards that she has been. Why?

  It’s only right, of course, that she shouldn’t see me, for she does not love me, and has a conviction that she interferes with my work. What is my work? What avails all the art in the world? Most men of genius had something the matter with them: Wagner, a fanatic; Michelangelo, a sexual invert; Flaubert, impotent; Shelley, estranged from normal society, like Byron; Balzac, consumed with ambition to prove—what? According to Julian Warbeck, with whom I walked all day yesterday—except when he stood in some pub and drank pint after pint of beer and I drank a glass of milk—most geniuses are onanists and so bring on neuroticism and weakness of mind: Algernon Charles Swinburne especially, said Julian. He agreed with me that such examples give scientists like Max Nordau—a flat-footed drain-inspector, Julian called him—the theory of art madness. Even Jesus was a madman, possessed of delusions of grandeur, and according to Nordau, via Warbeck (who got the expression flat-footed drain-inspector from Compton Mackenzie, who in one of his books calls Nordau a flat-footed bus-conductor) was a homosexualist and should have been locked up. That, to me, is the view of a distorted intuition: for true intuition surely springs from love and pity. The instinct of pity derives from generations of female mammals being tender with their young.

  This evening I risked Mrs. Portal-Welch’s possible displeasure by taking Warbeck to the Club. Julian swore he would not say a word this time. “Anyway, it’s not worth it, with those people.” On his first and last appearance there, as my guest, he tore John Crowe, the Cornish psychologistal novelist, to bits, and Mrs. P-W told me I mustn’t bring him again.

  This time Ronald Harsnop was giving the address, on the Freudian novel, which he derided, saying that a dose of liver salts would cure most of the frustrated thoughts of an author, and why should he anyway inflict them on a reading public which wanted, first and always, a story of character and action. He included in this category some of the (unnamed) war-poets, calling them defeatists, weak men, unable to hold their own in war. Harsnop is himself a versifier, who published several books in the war, one of them about a man shot for cowardice trying to mix among the ghosts of his comrades killed in battle, and being rejected for “a whining coward thing”. I read bits of it and thought it pretty awful trash.